With regard to the Samsung Note 7 fire fiasco, I have a question.
How is it that Samsung, a company that as far as I know has produced a long line of reliable and commercially successful products has suddenly produced a dud of dangerous proportions?
Presumably they have carried out in house reliability analyses, and outside beta testing among trusted members of the tech community for much of their product release history.
How in the hell has the current situation come to pass?
Batteries are usually produced by third parties (or different corporate entities) in the supply chain, and defects happen.
Apparently 2 million+ Note 7s were sold. Even if testing found a 99.99% success rate, that’s still 200 potential explosions once it scales up to that many. Same thing with the Toyota problems, etc… that’s what recalls are for.
The story I got was that Samsung hurried to beat Apple to the market with an alternative to the iPhone 7 and hurried on their testing. I hear that they still have not been able to determine what the problem was.
Bob
Same issue with the batteries in the hoverboards that were popular last Christmas. It looks like a combination of everyone trying to cram more power into the same battery space, and a battery producer that was —><— this close to having it right. Take an almost right battery, make millions of them, and even a low failure rate leads to some spectacular failures.
This is pure speculation, but I wonder if this might be analogous to the 80’s Audi moral panic, among other automobile panics with Toyota/Lexus brands which all were found to be bogus on the mechanical side and rather due to the mis-application of proper vehicle controls.
A difference I see, dasilva94, is in some of these cases with the batteries, the end user does not have much or even any input into “mis-application of proper controls” nor can notice if something’s potentially at risk of going wrong (e.g. with car acceleration you could observe too-close pedal placement or that the ignition/transmission controls work unintuitively, and retrain yourself to adapt) – the safeguards against overloads are supposed to be built-in to the charging/power system and blackboxed to the consumer.
Seems this may be an issue with battery products for a while that will require greater attention to what may ever possibly go wrong and how bad could the consequences be, than merely relying on “law of averages”.
Reminds me of the batteries on the 787 Dreamliner a couple years back, too.
They are at the limits of Technology with respect to power density. The power requirements of the Note 7 relative to the battery size pushes the envelope more than almost any other device yet made. Some battery experts suspect that dendrite growth within the compressed battery package during charging is piercing the insulating layers of the battery package and causing it to short.
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Title edited to indicate subject.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Question about the batteries: I assumed the Note 7 battery would be the same as in their other products, like the Galaxy S7 Active (the one I have). Evidently, that is not the case as I have not seen reports of problems with their other, similar products. In reference to what astro posted, perhaps the device itself is different enough that the way it interacts with the same battery is causing these issues?
Different Note7/S7 series devices have different batteries. Even just looking at the battery capacity in the specs, they are: Note 7 = 3500 mAh, S7 Edge = 3600 mAh, S7 Active = 4000 mAh, S7 = 3000 mAh. (All numbers from phonearena.com)
I read a technical assessment of the problem, and the assertion was that there were two separate issues: pinching of the battery due to a slight size mis-match, and a very slight manufacturing defect with the battery plate separators.
That story is from before the second recall, though. We know now the problem persisted after Samsung ostensibly fixed it and moved production to a second battery manufacturer, so something isn’t adding up quite right.
Maybe not so much this, of late …
Note the recall would have cost a small fraction what it will actually cost if Samsung had used user-removable batteries.
User-removable batteries are not coming back, no matter how much you complain.
A difficulty for Samsung is that batteries are made by - Samsung SDI - a company Samsung has a 30% holding in. There are reports that the battery testing was done in a lab also owned by Samsung.
However there are suggestions that the battery is not itself the culprit, and that the very thin tolerances demanded of a modern thin smart-phone resulted in some batteries being compressed ever so slightly more than they should have been, resulting in an internal short that causes the conflagration.
Relative to the actual number produced the number of failures is tiny. Being able to test for such failures is impossibly hard. You rely upon a connected set of design and test procedures to gain confidence. The battery will be tested to work within a known set of constraints - including mechanical pressure. The design will avoid exceed thing this. Manufacture will maintain tolerances within the design limits. The battery manufacture will maintain dimension within defined limits. You only really need a small error anywhere here, across millions of phones produced to end up with a failure.
It isn’t going to be easy working this out.
Big call. Fashions in devices come and go.
Why do they take away user-removable batteries? I’ve always been annoyed at having to get a battery case for my iPhones, while I could always just get a larger battery on my Android phones, but … not anymore?
If you look inside a modern phone is is almost entirely battery. Battery technology has come a long way since the days of easy replaceable batteries in phones, and the demands upon them has increased significantly too. Batteries in phones are now custom designed for the individual phone, and are designed to take every last nook and cranny up. They are flexible and have zero protection. By the time you added in the battery’s own case, and the modifications to the phone case to make it structurally capable of handling a removable battery, building a modern phone with a replaceable battery would make it about twice the volume, for no gain in performance. Keeping he dimensions (or relaxing them a bit) would leave you with a phone that may not make it through the day on a charge. Which is a non-starter. Nobody would buy it.
And most people don’t care about a removable battery. When you are building millions of phones with a do or die in the marketplace requirement, the downsides of a replaceable battery are vastly too high. The same capability is provided (much more safely) with an after market charger/battery, one that has the rather useful property it can be used to charge your other toys (such as bluetooth headset) and is not tied to just one model of phone (and can thus be shared.)
Except for LG. Even their new top of the line V20 smartphone has a removable battery.